I realize I’m biased, but my father was a fascinating man. As a librarian, he fully supported open access to information. When I found this letter from Dee Brown, I wondered at first who he was… the name sounded familiar, but it wasn’t clicking. I looked him up and realized I had never read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. I then wondered how Dad knew him. It was easy to discover that they worked together as librarians at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
Not surprisingly, this bumped Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee up near the top of my reading list. Well, my free time reading, as opposed to book review reading. It is not light reading. (To be fair, all my book review reading is fiction.) Dee Brown compiled the history of how the United States’s government systematically betrayed, slaughtered, and stole from the Native Americans time and time again.
“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” We are past the stage where our government opens fire on unarmed native villages. In the era this book was written, the United States’ government had a more subtle approach to genocide – they were engaged in a sterilization program targeting minorities, including American Indians. In the modern era, according to this article on CNN, Native Americans are “killed in police encounters at a higher rate than any other racial or ethnic group.”
And here we go again… our government recently decided that the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, the remnants of the tribe that welcomed the Pilgrims, doesn’t fit the legal definition of “Indian” and is not entitled to their reservation, or more specifically, to a casino they want to build there.
It’s almost like they don’t know the area’s history. Or worse, they do, and don’t care.